An elderly Palestinian couple were restored to life after eight days among the dead, entombed in the rubble of a home demolished by Israeli army bulldozers - the unlikely survivors of the deadliest single episode of Israel's crushing military offensive.

Three generations of the Shuabi family were buried alive when the shovel of an Israeli army bulldozer clawed the second floor off their home in the old town of Nablus, collapsing the building on 10 occupants.

Abdallah Shuabi, a baker, 68, and his wife, Shams, were trapped in a small dark room on the ground floor. "We could not tell if it was night or day," said Shams.

The couple listened to the distant thud of Israeli tank shells pummelling the old city of Nablus, and the crackle of gunfire. Occasionally, they heard Israeli soldiers speaking in Hebrew in the rubble above their heads.

They had a bottle of mineral water and two rounds of pitta bread. But after several days, the air inside their underground prison grew stale. Their food and water ran out, and the couple grew weak and disoriented.

"On the eighth day, my wife said, 'Today is our last. We are going to die today,'" Mr Shuabi recalled yesterday. "I started to tell her to forgive me, that we were going to die. We had no hope." In tears, the couple began reciting the Muslim affirmation of faith: There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.

Above ground, relatives gave the couple up for dead.

"After that, I heard somebody knocking," Mr Shuabi said. "I told her there is somebody above. I heard people calling my name, saying, 'Are you there? Don't be afraid, we are coming to rescue you.'"

It was an extraordinary rescue mission, launched under gunfire from Israel soldiers enforcing the 24-hour curfew imposed on Nablus since Israeli tanks entered 12 days ago.

The Palestinian fire brigade dug through a 2-metre mound of masonry and debris, looped a rope harness around Mr Shuabi and winched him back to life. It was a more difficult proposition to extricate his wife, who weighs nearly 20 stone.

The 14 Palestinian firemen were forced to burrow further still to haul out the corpses: Mr Shuabi's brother, Omar, 85, and his daughters, Fatima and Abir, and son, Samir. By clawing through the rubble until 3am on Saturday, they also recovered the bodies of Samir's pregnant wife, Nabila, and the couple's three small sons, Abdallah, Azam, and Anas.

"I felt like someone who died and was brought back to life," said Mr Shuabi.

Details of the ordeals suffered by the Shuabi family and others are slowly beginning to emerge, days after the Israeli army's wrecking missions in the centres of Palestinian resistance: the vaulted alleys of Nablus's old city, and the refugee camp of Jenin.

Amid the chaos, it remains impossible to be certain how many Palestinians have died. The old city of Nablus yesterday was a scene of destruction, with buildings sheared in half by Israeli rockets. Elsewhere, there were heaps of rubble where old stone houses once stood.

The confusion has fuelled accusations of a massacre in the Jenin refugee camp, where Palestinians say the Israeli army slaughtered hundreds of people - civilians as well as gunmen - and then tried to cover up the carnage by bulldozing the bodies where they fell, or stealing them away for burial.

Yesterday, Israel's supreme court barred the army from collecting the dead for burial in a remote cemetery in the Jordan Valley. The court ruled the army should allow Palestinians to bury their own dead, and authorised the Red Cross to monitor burials.

However, it said that if the funerals were not carried out quickly, the army could then move in.

Israel's ban on journalists and humanitarian organisations has made it impossible to verify the death toll of Palestinians in Jenin or Nablus. Palestinian estimates of the dead in the Jenin refugee camp run into the hundreds, but the Israeli army yesterday cut its original estimate of 150 dead to 37.

The Israeli defence minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, said the number of deaths in Jenin stands at "tens of killed and not hundreds - most of them gunmen who shot at our forces".

Colonel Dan Reisner, an international law adviser in the army advocate-general's office, said 37 Palestinian bodies had been found in army searches of the Jenin refugee camp.

Thus far, Israeli officials said 11 Palestinian bodies found have been turned over to relatives and hospitals and have been buried.

The Israeli army says it has no information about the collapse of the Shuabi family home, and claims that army engineers were on the scene when homes were demolished to prevent damage to neighbouring buildings.

It also says the Shuabis' home was close to a Palestinian homemade bomb factory.

The Shuabis say that the women of the house had screamed at the Israeli soldiers that there were civilians and many children inside, but their protests went unheeded.